


The Gravity in Everything

by mumblefox



Series: Across, Around, and Upside Down [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Couch Cuddles, Drift Hangover, M/M, Multi, Platonic Relationships, Telepathic Bond, asexual Keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-23 01:52:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8309233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblefox/pseuds/mumblefox
Summary: After forming Voltron for the first time, the Paladins find themselves connected in ways they didn't expect, and they have to learn how to navigate through it together.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So after watching Voltron I was kinda like what if five people driving a single robot is basically drifting and then my brain made the metal gear solid alert sound and was like DRIFT HANGOVER and here we are. anyway platonic relationships are important kids and so are feelings and so is Talking It Out so there's lots of all of that.

The first time they form Voltron, it's an accident.  
  
None of them know how it happened, and none of them know how it works. They're busy - the adrenalin of the fight keeps them distracted, keeps them functioning, smooth and sharp as a killing wind - and they don't stop to question the how or the why or the what-if-this-goes-horribly-wrong.  
  
It takes longer than it might have, otherwise, for them to notice the way their thoughts have started to run over and around each other, overlapping seamlessly.

It is not Shiro who turns the head, or Hunk who moves the foot. There is no chain of command, no human communicating with lion communicating with the body communicating with the rest of the disparate parts.

There is only Voltron. A body, charged with frustrated energy, as though it has been long-buried and is now unearthed, hauled out gasping into the light of day. Awake, and whole, and alive alive alive alive _alive_.

After ten thousand years, Voltron’s first fight is an exaltation. The humans at its core are fierce and noble and they fight to protect, and they are Voltron - raising their head into the clouds, bearing a heart the size of a battleship and pride that could swallow a sun. They set aside their own skins. With one mind, they raise their fists against the Galra.

And the Galra, for the first time in millennia, are beaten from the sky.  
  
When it's over, they let Voltron fall back into pieces. It is a release, an exhale. A simple letting go. None of them know how that happened, either. There will be time to learn.

But with nothing to distract them now, they start to notice.  
  
The castle opens its doors and they fly the lions back towards the hangar, but they're clumsy, bumping shoulders, knocking on each other with paws and tails - everyone trying to occupy the same space. Every impact seems to echo, somehow. Every impact reverberates, doubles, triples. Where it might have caused a fight, before, it now only causes them

confusion

mild concern

vague embarrassment.

They land and walk to the castle instead, to minimize the damage while they recalibrate.  
  
Allura is talking to them over the comms, but it's so hard to focus on her voice. Like there's something drowning her out - some white noise she can't speak over. The lions purr, comforting and alien and proud, inside their heads.  
  
As they pass through the doors, Pidge wonders about physiology, about balance being affected by zero gravity, checks the time, mentally writes notes on a spreadsheet.

Beside her, the yellow lion's head dips, and it veers sideways; Pidge is occupied and doesn't see it, but Keith, trailing behind them, does.  
  
He sees trajectories, velocity, what would be needed to avoid the collision. There isn’t even time to open his mouth.

But -  
  
Sleek and sure, the green lion gathers itself, tucks its front feet, jumps just high enough to sail smoothly over Yellow's back. The lions change places without exchanging a word and bump their shoulders together. Keith feels the impact double back on both of his shoulders.

One from Pidge, he realizes. One from Hunk.  
  
“Wait,” Keith says out loud, and only then do they realize how quiet it's been. “We - I mean, there’s, uh - you didn't see that coming.”  
  
He says it like it's a fact, and it is. There is a thundering, conquering silence as each of them get a grip on what he's saying - and on what he's not, what he can't pin down enough to put words to. Something about a sudden confusion between what the words we and me mean. Something bigger than I.  
  
“Alright,” Hunk says, “everyone else is feeling really weird, right? I can't be the only one who feels this weird.” They're only barely in the main hangar, but Yellow stops, dips her head, and Hunk tumbles out. Blue crouches down beside her and Lance emerges, just as graceless.  
  
“I feel like I have six legs,” says Lance, “or eyes, maybe? No, we have - no.” He leans against Blue's foot. The sensation that he's somehow watching himself do so spins the floor underneath him. It's as if there are mirrors all around him, and none of them are reflecting the same thing. Most of them aren't even reflecting him - as though he's looking with other eyes, from another place. If he could just pick one, he might be alright, but the thing with mirrors is that they're always reflecting everything.  
  
He's leaning against Blue's foot, forehead to metal, eyes closed. Somehow, he sees Red and Green slide around Blue and curve down to join her. He sees Blue lying down, sees himself standing, sees -  
  
“Yeah, everybody out,” Shiro says, hopping neatly over Blue's back, a glide like water. They’re already doing it - they know - it doesn’t need to be said aloud. But it makes them feel better to hear Shiro talking them through it.

They’re okay. They decide, all at once, that this is okay. What they feel is strange, but nonthreatening; they’re confused, but not

sick

scared

nervous. Confused is okay. Maybe they should be concerned, too, but they’re not.

Each of them has been a little drunk before, and that’s close - that subtle world-tilting, spine-floating looseness of reality. The way thoughts swirl together and then slip away. A pleasant spin, a dance unending. The giddy lightness of being.

If it weren’t for Shiro, holding them together with a voice like encircling arms and a calm like solid ground, it would be so easy to drift in this feeling, to drift apart. But he is, and they don’t. He leads, and they follow, the way body follows head, the way words follow thoughts, the way day follows night.

Shiro waits until Red and Green settle with their sisters, and then Black sits, bows, sets him free.  
  
Keith steps out of Red's mouth carefully, guiding himself with strict attention. He feels like he's wading in a river at night, waist deep in some force he can't see clearly. This, at least, is familiar: this is the same force that called him to the Garrison, and then to the desert. To Shiro. To Blue. He recognizes the pull, but the strength of it is new to him. This is a river in flood, wild and consuming.

This is just some kind of hangover, he thinks, from bonding with Red. The water around him swirls, and he corrects the thought: from bonding with them. He isn't sure where that thought came from. Isn't sure what it means.  
  
The water moves around him, ceaseless, almost urgent. He feels Yellow's tail curve up and settle over Red's as though Hunk, standing next to him, had laid an arm across his shoulders. He looks across to find Hunk standing where he'd been spat out and looking straight back at him, their twinned surprise strung like a wire between them.

Hunk has already yanked off half his armour. Keith doesn’t look over, but he knows Lance has too. He can feel cool air on newly-exposed skin, cotton pressed into stiff shapes by sweat and compression, loosening from his skin one thread at a time as he breathes. Keith places a gloved hand on his armoured stomach, trying to reconcile what he feels with what is real. His armour is on: it is solid under his palm, but his fingers are pressing into his skin. It isn’t possible that he can feel both at once, but he is.

Reality glides. It doesn’t matter, can’t matter. They’re safe. This has an easy fix. The hard plating is good protection, but right now, having been freshly stuffed back into his skin, it’s only a confinement.

There’s something in that thought he needs to look at more closely, but he can’t quite figure out which part. He pops the latches on his vambraces and the interlocking mechanism of his suit pops the rest; the joints in his armour release themselves, and he yanks the pieces off while trying to work out what’s going on.  
  
Leaving Red is okay - he still feels her thrumming behind him as her jaws close, as she settles her weight into Black's flank. It doesn't calm the river; distance from her is not the problem or the solution. He watches Pidge climb out of Green, armour already off but helmet in hand, and look around.

Whatever this is, it’s not a malfunction of the helmet’s interface. He knows Pidge is going to test for it anyway, because it’s all she can think to do. The water pinches Keith, low in the chest, and he knows it as unease. He hates to not know what's happening.  
  
Doesn't he?  
  
Then Hunk drops his final armour piece on the floor and the sound ricochets in the vaulted ceiling of the hangar bay. All of them wince. They do it in sync.  
  
“Can someone please come here?” Hunk says, looking a little lost. His voice is loud, too loud for the small area created by the circle of their lions. “I think I need -”  
  
He cuts off, painfully unsure, but the idea he's reaching for is something all of them are feeling and that none of them can grasp properly. Lance sees the mirrors turn back on one another, simplifying, clarifying. To Keith, it's the river. It's what drags and pulls and carries him and, for the first time, it’s shoving him towards the bank.  
  
Pidge stands at a circuit board with too many wires connecting too many things. Whatever Hunk is asking for, it's causing a light to blink calmly, like a heartbeat, near the top. There's a circuit in her hand, waiting to be connected.  
  
Shiro feels it as the turning of an ineluctable machine, powerful as every other in his life: sim and ship and arm and lion. He knows he is not the pilot, maybe not even a passenger, but he knows what the parts do and how they work together. The gears are slipping, though - turning out of sync, needing to close the distance.  
  
Hunk is a home. He stands and waits as though every door and window in him has been thrown open, as though anything could creep in and ruin him, but he's choosing to believe it won't. Inside, the lights are burning. His is a heart that can hold back the night.  
  
Lance is the first to collapse into it.  
  
“Yeah, buddy, I gotcha,” he says, careening away from Blue. Hunk catches him and grabs on, and Lance throws his arms around Hunk’s neck and plants a big, sloppy kiss on his cheek, and they both burst out laughing.  
  
The circuit connects, and the whole board lights. Shiro feels it happen deep in his chest, turns as Pidge sets her helmet down carefully. He opens his arms, a question that he knows he doesn't have to ask, but does anyway. Pidge rushes into them, and he lifts her straight off her feet. She folds her legs around his hips, holding herself up, arms wound tight around his neck. He buries his face in her shoulder. Then he reaches out a hand for Keith.  
  
The water runs clear, clean, without turbulence. Red is curled around Black's feet, nose almost touching Green's, but he can still feel her watching him, appraising, approving. He takes a deep breath, takes a step forward, takes Shiro's hand.  
  
Shiro pulls him in. Pidge leans back, just enough to get an arm around him, and Keith buries his face between her stomach and Shiro's chest and wraps an arm around each of them. Pidge's arm is curled around his head, almost protectively. He can feel how easily Shiro holds her weight, as though it were his arm, and his weight.  
  
“I was right,” says Hunk. “I needed a hug.”  
  
Keith knows they're coming over even before they press in at his side, Hunk piggybacking Lance, cheeks smushed together. He can feel Hunk's hands under Lance's thighs, holding him up, as though they were his hands, and his legs.  
  
He is still in the river. The current is smooth and calm. There is bedrock under his feet. He feels plugged in, clean pistons firing, doors wide open. Alight. He feels seen, completely and kindly known, as if from every angle.  
  
Gently, he turns the mirrors away.

He isn’t sure if anyone was looking, isn’t sure if they can. He isn’t even sure what he’s hiding, or hiding from. After a year spent alone, in the desert, in his self-imposed exile, this feeling is just a lot to handle.

“This is nice, isn’t it? Weird, I mean, but - nice,” says Lance, and his voice is dreamy, content. Half-asleep. He slips from Hunk’s back just as they start to feel the ache of his weight in their biceps, a phantom tension that reverberates more strongly now that they're together again.

The effect is fading, but slowly. One of them - two of them? more? -  is dreading the impending loss, and is spinning out a ribbon of desperate loneliness that Keith registers as an oil spill in his river, as lightbulbs sparking and going out, as rivets shaking loose.

“Hey, it’s alright. We’re alright,” says Shiro. Hearing it spoken aloud somehow makes it real, makes it true. Keith squeezes his hand, feels it echo four times. “Let’s just find a place to settle in.”

“Briefing room’s closest,” murmurs Pidge.

“Yeah, but the lounge has couches,” says Hunk.

A brief flicker of concern, distinctly Shiro’s: checking in, making sure everyone is on board. The emotion is answered, immediately and loudly, by a collective flare of assent, so unified that the lines dividing their rationalizations blur. There is no flood this time, no lights, no reflections - instead, there are the lions, surrounding them inside and out, joyfully roaring the word _together_ into every corner of their beings.

Shiro ducks his head under the weight of a sudden smile, and Pidge kisses his temple, sweet and shy, and for a moment they all lean closer together, swaying, pulled by the same current.

“Let’s go, then,” someone says, and they do. They trail out the gap between Green’s paw and Yellow’s flank. Her tail lifts to let them through, arcs high over their heads with a steady thrum of machinery. As they pass beneath, Lance cranes his head around to follow the powerful curve of it. They feel, acutely, the sheer size and weight and age of the lions that rest to either side, how small they are next to them, how strange it is to have been part of something so large. It is like talking to the mountains and having them rumble back, like asking a lake to move and having it acquiesce. Impossible, incomprehensible kinship. A fathomless gift.

The lions abide. Their paladins walk out the valley created by their flanks, Shiro still holding Pidge in one arm and reaching back for Keith with the other. Lance ducks under the bridge their linked hands create so that Shiro’s arm is draped across his shoulders instead, and Hunk links his arm with Keith’s remaining one. It's an inefficient way to walk, all bumping hips and tread-upon toes, and not one of them wants to travel any other way.

After a moment, Lance slips his arm around Keith’s waist, not clinging but guiding, and they move a little more surely after that, steps falling into sync.

The river flows, smooth and slow and shiny as a lake, as a mirror, catching the light that glows from the big house that sits on the bank.

“This _is_ nice,” says Pidge lazily. “Who’s the one that feels like a river?”

“Oh, that’s Keith,” says Hunk, and Keith glows a little to be so effortlessly recognized. “I like your circuit board, though. Very organized.”

“How can you tell?” says Lance. “There's so much overlap!”

“I dunno, Mr. Mirrors, it just feels like her.”

A little jolt runs through them, then, at hearing the pronoun spoken aloud.

Pidge lifts her head from Shiro's shoulder and blinks at them. “Oh,” she says, “I guess that cat’s out of the bag, right?”

They ping back their answer: reassurance that this changes nothing, gratitude for her trust, and affection above all, affection that is deep and kind and welcoming.

But Lance stumbles, catches himself, spins a whirlpool of shock through the river. It disturbs the reflection, and even when it settles, it’s not as clear as it was before. They know what it means. The oily ribbon of loneliness bleeds back in, and this time, it stays.

“How did everybody know but me?” Lance says.

“Most of us pay attention,” says Keith. He doesn’t mean for it to sound cruel, but Lance hears the words more clearly than the intention, and prickles at it. They’re muddying the waters, closing the doors. The conflict registers as unoiled hinges grinding together, a screech they feel rather than hear.

“Knock it off, guys.” Shiro stops walking, and they all stop as though it’s gravity, as though he is still head and heart and guiding light. “Can’t you feel it fading?”

The ribbon swirls, splits into five. Sudden, anxious division. Lance’s hand leaves Keith’s side to grab a fistful of Hunk’s shirt instead, as though checking to make sure he’s still there.

Pidge adjusts her glasses. “If you have to argue, do it after, okay? Whatever this is, it’s gonna be gone soon.”

The circuit board clicks over to another line, and they feel the whir of numbers being spun. Pidge shakes her head. “I was trying to estimate time, but I don’t think it’s following a consistent rate of decay. It got worse when Shiro closed himself off, and then again when Keith did. But I noticed - oh!” All of them feel the hot blush of shame that Shiro can’t quite bury, and crowd in around him, their little orbits collapsing around his burning sun. “No, Shiro, don’t apologize, it’s okay.”

“I didn’t want to,” says Shiro. “There’s just...a lot going on, and I don’t trust my memory yet.” The fear that runs under his words is heavy, and they carry it in their molars, where it’s been bitten back so often the taste has faded. All that remains is bleak determination: to never give it voice, to never let it out. Cramped fingers on a dead man’s switch. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ruin anything. I just know there’s stuff in my head that I have to protect you guys from."

“Shiro,” says Hunk softly. “You know we’ll protect you from it, too, if we can.” His palm is resting on Shiro’s ribs, a spot of shifting warmth they can feel as he breathes. “If you’ll let us.”

It had to be said, but it’s too much, too soon. Shiro turns his head away, and is instantly, effortlessly rescued.

“Hey, at least he has an excuse,” Lance says. “What’s yours, Keith?”

“Don’t have one,” Keith says. “I just don’t like you guys that much.”

That, at last, gets some joy out of all of them, to differing degrees of brightness. Shiro only bends his face down to Keith’s hair, where he can feel his smile, but it’s as warm as Hunk’s laugh, and Pidge’s exasperated sigh, and Lance’s elbow, prodding him.

“Hey, that hurts our feelings. You tryin’a hurt our feelings?” Lance says, and his voice is half-teasing, half-stern, a voice he’s used on younger siblings all his life. He opens the memory to them, a cautious unfurling, petals to the sun: family in every room of a slightly-too-small house, fists hammering on bathroom doors, bodies stretched out on a carpet over homework, big thumbs wiping away little tears, a chaotic blend of voices and activities and wants and fights and love over all of it, love easy as breathing, and tough as nails.  

It’s something Keith has never known. He gasps, clutches at the memory, at the thread of what’s underneath it: a full heart with room for more. It’s not an invitation, not quite. Not yet. Lance’s arm tightens around his waist, just briefly. Reassurance, acknowledgement. Putting a pin in his yearning.

When it calms, Keith notices a gaping emptiness to his left. Pidge’s face is carefully blank, gaze far away. If he’s still connected to her circuitboard, Keith can’t tell. He remembers the Galra ship, before Red, before Voltron, when she’d put her missing family above their mission.

He knows she will again, knows he’ll have to argue because Shiro won’t, Lance won’t. For now, he lets it be. It’s a fight he doesn’t want to have right now.

They lapse, for the first time since leaving their lions, into a silence laced with stress, with tension. The spaces between them, where Shiro and Keith and Pidge closed themselves off, yawn open.

They’re so lonely, all of them. He should have seen it sooner, but recognizes it all at once, notices it the way one notices a suckerpunch to the gut. He sees it in the way Hunk and Lance stay stubbornly linked, sees it in Pidge refusing to think too closely about family, in Shiro holding his pain close to his chest.

Keith has been alone all his life, and it’s become one of his truest strengths. Knowing that he could only rely on himself has kept him alive. He’s never quite appreciated the difference between solitude and loneliness before, though; he always knew both to be a pitfall, and he learned how to traverse it early, and he never looked down.

Sometime between finding Red and this moment, that had changed. He recognizes the loneliness in each of them, the different shapes of it, and sees his solitude stacked beside theirs.

Sees it for what it is.

But he sees this, too: arms around him, Red behind him, the strength of Voltron lingering in his muscle memory. The kind of togetherness you build because you want to. The kind of family you find instead of being born into.

He’s been lonely all his life, but he’s never been less lonely than he is right now.

And that’s the thought he opens to them, the emotion that he uses to bridge the river. It’s an invitation, offered the only way he knows: full-throttle, full-hearted, no hesitation at all. A decision made and carried through. An instinct acted on.

Pidge gasps a soft _oh!_ of realization and her circuitboard connects, lights, busy and bright. Lance jolts upright, and Keith sees the mirrors, newly lit, that line the hallways of a big house, doubling the space so that it looks twice as big inside as it does outside.

“Hey, there we go, buddy, welcome back,” Lance says as Hunk, pleased and glowing with it, ruffles Keith’s hair. Keith bats him away.

There’s no sign of Shiro’s machine. He stays rueful, regretful, holding himself apart even though they’re all four wrapped around him. They don’t push. He knows he’s welcome. If he decides to join them, it has to be his call.

Full of ridiculous fondness, Hunk opens his own memory to them, like light in cupped palms, lets it roll out and over them all: waves breaking outside, not far off; rain that patters against the windows and light that pushes back; the smell of bread baking, of onions freshly chopped. An old radio crackling out a song he hasn’t heard in years. Tools at his elbow and parts in his hands, the rush of building something good, something new. Of creating. The freedom of having nowhere else to be.

“You miss the familiar,” Keith says slowly, not quite sure if he should. It felt right when Shiro talked them through it, before, but Shiro has stopped talking, and Keith doesn’t feel right stepping in until Hunk leans into him, encouraging. “Like Lance misses home, like Pidge misses family, like Shiro misses safety. I get it. We’ll find it, Hunk. Together, we’re gonna find it.”

Pidge sighs, adjusts her glasses, feigning exasperation. But they’re together again, and they can feel her absurd affection anyway. “You’re all so sappy,” she says. “It’s almost embarrassing.”

“Only almost!” Hunk waggles his eyebrows at Keith, who returns him a flat stare, so he sweeps Lance up instead, bridal-style. Lance gasps dramatically and pretends to swoon in his arms, wrist to forehead, toes pointed.

“I revoke the almost,” Pidge says, deadpan.

“Hey, you’re being carried too. Keith is gonna feel left out.”

“Keith most certainly does not,” Keith says, but Hunk has already turned his back to him, knees bent and braced.

“Alright, hop on,” he says.

“Why.”

“Yeah, come on, I’m in your head or whatever. I know you’re not actually cool. Secret’s out, man. Embrace your inner dork.” He waggles his butt back and forth. “And anyway, it’ll help embarrass Pidge.”

“Hey, whoa, you’re not embarrassing me, you’re embarrassing yourselves.”

“It’s sort of the same thing right now to be honest? Keith, dude, I can’t squat forev - there we go! Ha!”

He stands triumphantly, Lance in his arms, Keith clinging to his back. He takes off immediately, trundling down the hallway as quickly as he can with the added weight and the strange balance, and Shiro follows.

“What are you doing?” he says, not shouting after him because Hunk isn’t going very fast at all, and is not very far at all.

“I’m a leeeeeeeg!” Hunk shouts back, and Keith laughs, holding tight, Lance’s hands on his wrists, using his own weight to counterbalance.

Shiro pulls up alongside them, long legs casually matching their pace. Pidge points over her shoulder. “Briefing room is back on the left,” she says.

“Lounge has couches!” Lance says, flailing a playfully combative foot at Shiro, and Hunk almost drops him.

“Lounge is on the right,” she sighs as Shiro swerves them both out of kicking range.

“That’s my navigator!” Lance crows as Hunk swerves them in turn into the lounge and dumps Lance unceremoniously on the nearest couch. Lance reaches up, arms open, and Shiro drops Pidge down on top of him. She lands with an elbow in his gut and he pitches her off, and she hits the floor laughing.

They pile in. Hunk takes one end, pulling Lance into his arms so they’re back-to-chest in the corner, snuggled comfortably into the armrest. Lance belatedly wrenches a pillow out from behind him and settles it in his lap, gesturing Shiro to lie back. He’s the tallest of them, and takes up most of the couch when he obliges. One of Hunk’s hands falls to Shiro’s head, brushing his white hair out of his face.

He closes his eyes, hums contentedly at the touch. Pidge crams herself in between the back of the couch and Shiro, head on his chest, and his arm goes around her.

Keith stands awkwardly, trying to find a place, suddenly unsure, and Shiro - lazy, loose, expression soft without the shock of white in his face - lets one leg drop off the side, planting his foot on the floor. It leaves room on the couch that Keith takes, stretching out on his stomach between Shiro’s legs, head pillowed on his arms on Shiro’s stomach. He has to keep his legs bent at the knees, feet hooked over the arm of the couch.

Pidge flops her arm over him, and Lance reaches, can’t quite get contact. Keith drops an arm from Shiro, reaches back, and Lance laces their fingers together with a happy sigh.

There’s no use trying to make sense of this feeling. Hunk is touching Shiro touching Keith touching Lance touching Pidge. Keith can feel Hunk’s leg against the small of Lance’s back, can feel Pidge’s heart beating against Shiro’s ribs, Hunk’s fingers tangled in Shiro’s hair as though they were his fingers and his hair. All of them, together. All of them, as close to one body and one mind as they can be without Voltron. All of them letting go of I and me and mine.

They drift into and through and around each other. They’re Katie, they’re Japanese, they’re a home and a river and they’re none of those. They’ll figure it out later.

A thought occurs to them, and they reach out for the lions, find them waiting, fond and proud and curled together in their hangar. We’re Voltron, they think, and it’s a question the lions curl protectively around.

Yes, they say. Yes. They open a piece of their being to their Paladins, just a sliver of what they are, of what Voltron is: the knowledge of millennia, the memory of fists, of power. Of protecting, always. They are the memory of the Paladins that have come before. They are an unbroken line of warriors and monarchs and rebels, and the Galra are not the first conquerors they have devoured. They are ancient and they are undefeated.

And we chose you, they say. Their voices are a purr, fading, drawing back. Rest. We are home. Rest. We chose you. We chose right. Rest.

They withdraw. Their Paladins sigh to feel them go, hands grabbing tight to whatever they can reach, anchoring each other against the loss.

The contact echoes, intersects with easy inevitability, like ripples meeting in a pond. Soft, silent, gentle, calm, a bright surface catching the light over cool depths.

They sink. They shift, adjust, breathe deep. They settle. Fatigue drags at them, amplified and irresistible, and it pulls each of them slowly into sleep.

Shiro fights it, holds it back with the ease of too much practice. He feels the shift in each of them from waking to sleeping, stays awake to savour the sweetness of their trust, stays awake to watch over them, to let them rest. He smiles when Hunk’s hand goes heavy on his brow and slips off, when Pidge twitches in her sleep and Keith, mostly asleep himself, reaches across to pull her glasses off her face for her.

It’s been a long time since Shiro was anything besides a weapon. He has guessed he was a gladiator or a mercenary - knows he was, in some fashion, the Galra’s favourite fighting dog - but his body carries the memory of it more than his mind does. One day, it will all come back. He doesn’t mind waiting, doesn’t really want to know. One thing he’s sure of, though, is that it’s been a long time since he was touched with anything approaching kindness.

Perhaps it’s a human trait, to need touch like this. Maybe it’s just him. But either way, this togetherness is something he needs, and he can’t sleep when he’s this heart-full, when he’s being so loved.

He’s connected enough to feel them breathing, to feel their hearts beating, to feel the various points where their arms or legs are falling asleep. One of Keith’s feet is tingling so strongly that Shiro keeps flexing his own foot against the carpet, hoping to dispel it. It’ll wake him soon, probably. They’ll all wake soon.

For now, he holds them tightly, presses his lips to the top of Pidge’s head, promises them all, silently, that he won’t ever let his nightmares become theirs. Promises, silently: you before me, in all things. You before me, always.

This is how Coran and Allura find them, not much later. Piled on each other, a tangle of arms and legs on a couch that was clearly not designed to hold five people at once. They’re asleep, mostly. Hunk has his head tilted over the back of the couch and is snoring. Pidge’s glasses are clasped loosely in Keith’s right hand. His left is linked with Lance’s, who is curled up against Hunk, silent and still.

The Alteans stand and take in the scene for a moment. Shiro is the only one who is alert, but he’s pinned, and makes no effort to free himself. His eyebrows tilt at them reproachfully.

“I would explain,” Shiro says, keeping his voice down, “but you don’t seem surprised.” Keith blinks awake at the rumble of his words anyway.

“Ah,” says Coran succinctly, and he turns on his heel and leaves. Hunk stops snoring, lifts his head drowsily.

“Whozzat?’ he says, rubbing at an eye with his fist.

“Oh, this is a common side effect,” says Allura, coming to kneel next to them. She speaks softly, too, but her voice wakes Lance, who grins lopsidedly at her. “Usually it is not so, ah...strong, or I would have warned you.”

“Could have warned us anyway,” says Shiro, but the rebuke is a gentle one. His voice rumbles up from the couch, warm and pleasant as a purr, where he rests with his arms full of Keith and Pidge.

“This is a good sign,” she says firmly. “The stronger the bond, the stronger Voltron will be. We will need this strength if we are to defeat Zarkon.” She stands, tall and graceful and strong, and a ripple of helpless admiration shivers through them. “Take all the time you need,” she says. “We're safe for now.”

“Yes, bossma’am,” says Lance, voice stretched around a yawn. Allura pats him on the head as she goes, and Lance smiles, sighs, shifts to curl back into Hunk.

Pidge’s head lifts off Shiro’s chest, and Keith wordlessly passes her glasses back to her. “I’m not gonna lie, I could eat,” she says, popping them on. “My arm is so asleep I might just have to cut it off.”

“If you do, you can borrow mine,” Shiro says, smiling. “Anyway, I could eat, too.”

“There's no way I could lug that thing around, Shiro, it’s the size of my entire leg. Nice of you to offer, though.” She pries herself up from between Shiro and the couch, considers her escape routes, and clambers over the back of the couch. There’s a thud as her feet hit the floor on the other side. Nobody feels the impact in their own feet; they’ve drifted back into their own skins. “Keith, let Shiro up. We’re gonna go eat.”

“Nope,” he says, and Shiro laughs, slides a fond hand into his hair. “He didn’t sleep. Shiro, you should sleep.”

“Probably,” he says, “but it can wait.”

“No, Takashi,” Keith says sternly. “This was our deal, remember? You’re staying.”

The use of Shiro's name shocks Pidge alert. For the first time, she remembers that Keith and Shiro knew each other before the Kerberos mission. She wonders about the deal, about why it was necessary. She wonders about how quietly they both closed themselves off earlier.

She wonders how she missed it.

“Oh.” Shiro tilts his head, considering, and Keith tips his face up enough to glare at him. “I thought you might have forgotten,” Shiro says. “It was a long time ago.”

“Of course I didn’t forget,” Keith says, and there’s a current of emotion under the words that is strong enough to ripple through them one final time.

“Oh, hey, you know what, I’m suddenly hungry.” Lance pulls his legs from under Shiro’s head, awkwardly extricates himself from the pile of bodies. “Hunk, let’s go. I’m perishing.”

“Yeah, alright.” Hunk goes too, sliding free easily now that Lance is gone. “Jeez, what’s the rush?”

“Pidge is hungry,” Lance says, throwing an arm over her shoulders. “Remember how cranky she gets when she’s hungry.”

“You’re thinking of you,” Pidge grumbles, but lets him steer the three of them out the door.

This is familiar, at least. The five of them together - that was good, but this is good, too: the Garrison trio, just with fewer secrets. The Garrison trio, strong as ever.

“About time they figured themselves out,” Hunk says when they’re out of earshot.

“Huh?” Lance squints down at Pidge’s smirk. “Great, something else I don’t know. Is someone else a secret girl? Is it Keith?”

“I mean him and Shiro,” Hunk says patiently.

“What about him and Shiro? You mean how desperately Keith wants to go to bone town with him? I thought they’d been doing that for ages.”

“They haven’t,” Pidge says. “But I think they’re getting there.”

“About time. If he didn’t make a move, I was going to.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“I was thinking about it. Let’s not pretend we haven’t all thought about it.”

“Well, now I have, you ass.”

“Seriously though, does anyone wanna go make out?”

“Ugh.” Pidge shoves him and he careens happily into Hunk, who catches and steadies him without even blinking.

His answer is yes, and Lance knows it, and Pidge knows it. They know it even without the Voltron hangover, know it from knowing him, from being known. Lance tips back onto his own feet and they keep moving, but he leaves his fingers tangled in Hunk’s.

This, too, is familiar. What’s different is that they feel their connection like a solid thing, like a rope they’ve all got a grip on. Like a house, windows pouring light into the night, doors open, walls full of mirrors. A heart with room to spare.

Somewhere behind them, the river meets the dam and the machinery turns, electric.

Somewhere ahead of them, they are Voltron again. Together in a body big enough for five, together with their head in the sky and their feet on the earth, with no room for loneliness between. A shield, a battering ram. Triumphant.

Somewhere ahead of them, they’re home.  
  
For now, this is enough: strange food with good friends, a strange castle full of family, a strange new world that they’ll tackle together. The new and the beloved. The start of a legend.

The defenders of the universe, with their first task behind them.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Andy](http://ashinan.tumblr.com/) and [Lisa Onions](http://archiveofourown.org/users/buttered_onions/pseuds/buttered_onions/) who helped me fix this up and then yelled at me until I actually posted it. they're both way better at Voltron fic than me so if you haven't checked out their stuff yet I hope you do! They also insisted I tell you that the working title for this fic was SO I HERD U LIKE SNUGGLEZ, which I still don't think is technically an incorrect title. a little irreverent, maybe. all of my working titles are like this


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